Latin America - a litany of challenges for Pope Francis

March 14, 2013|Hilary Burke and Paulo Prada | Reuters

BUENOS AIRES/RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - As archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio reached deep into communities to put his Church on the front lines of their social, economic and spiritual struggles.

In the vast slums that circle the Argentine capital, part of a massive urban sprawl of 13 million people, the man who this week became the first Latin American pope would occasionally celebrate Mass. More importantly, though, he deployed priests, nuns and others to minister to the poor, the sick and the uneducated.

It was a drive that aimed to bring the Catholic Church closer to its followers, and also protect its influence by slowing the advance of evangelical churches and other Protestant denominations that have spread rapidly across Latin America.

The efforts, subordinates say, reflect Bergoglio's belief that charity and compassion are at the core of the teachings of a church that more recently has spent as much time stemming scandal and losing parishioners as it has evangelizing and focusing on faith.

"He wants us out of the convents and churches and on the street," says Rosita Blanco, a 90-year-old nun at the convent where Bergoglio himself took first communion and went to kindergarten. "He wants us to listen to people."

It is there, though, on the street, where Pope Francis, as he is now called, saw firsthand the growing challenges undermining Catholicism's once firm grip on spiritual life in Latin America - from the growing secularism of an increasingly urban population, to inroads by rival faiths among worshippers who now feel out of step with the Church's ancient rituals and doctrine.

"This is a leader, like many from the Church in Latin America, who himself has witnessed poverty, rapid urbanization, and traumatic shifts in political and economic fortunes," said Kenneth Serbin, a historian who specializes in Latin American religion at the University of San Diego. "He knows that an appeal to the basics may be the best way to help the Church in the region and also around the world."

The challenges in Latin America are both immense and consequential for a church that hopes to renew its vitality through growth in Africa, Asia, and other parts of the developing world.

Though Latin America is still home to more Catholics than any other region worldwide, the percentage of people in the region who call themselves Catholic fell from about 90 percent in 1910 to 72 percent in 2010, according to The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

And the trend appears to be accelerating.

In Brazil, the world's biggest Catholic country, the number of people who called themselves Catholic tumbled from 74 percent in 2000 to 65 percent in 2010, according to government data. In Mexico, the world's second-biggest concentration of faithful, census figures show the number there fell from 88 percent to below 83 percent during the same decade.

Pope Benedict himself recognized the size of the problem.

"We must be better believers, more pious, affable and welcoming in our parishes and communities, so that no one feels distant or excluded," he said in remarks to Colombian bishops last June.

GROWING DISSATISFACTION

A growing dissatisfaction with Catholicism in Latin America in part is a result of some of the same problems that have plagued the Church elsewhere - sex abuse scandals, accusations of corruption and unbending Catholic teaching on birth control, sexuality and abortion.

But much of it has to do with the changing demographics of a region undergoing a fast and profound transformation.

While still trailing developed nations in most economic indicators, countries such as Brazil, Peru and Colombia over the past decade boasted some of the world's fastest-growing economies.

As Latin America grows more prosperous and more urban, many worshippers feel out of touch with a faith whose roots lay in a poor and rural past, when the Church was one of the few functioning institutions.

Indeed, much as the Church spread in Europe through the fiefdoms of the Middle Ages, Catholicism grew in Latin America because of its close ties to wealthy landowners and its support of an entrenched power structure.

"There's been a break from a not-so-distant past when the Church had spread because of its links to the rural elite," says Fernando Altemeyer, a theology professor at the Catholic University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. "As societies here move away from that structure, the Church hasn't known how to reorganize itself in response."

Even the Church admits that priests have been slow to follow as millions of rural faithful in recent decades migrated to cities such as Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City and Bogota in search of better lives.

"The Catholic Church simply didn't follow these migrations or keep up with the changes they led to," says Thierry Lienard de Guertechin, a Catholic priest and demographer in Brasilia, Brazil's capital.